Take a Bow, Man

 

Another #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax digs into the new Bowman set. 

 

Bowman is out! If you're a fan of certain teams, you might have one of those coveted "Bowman 1st" cards on your checklist, but for some of us it means a bunch of retreads appear in the prospect portion of set. Still, these are new cards that I need at this point, although I might have to start thinking a bit more carefully about how I use that word "need" in the future. In any case, I picked up a spot in a Crackin' Wax group break that featured the new Bowman set. Let's take a look here.

There's the base team set. That it's. That's the whole set. The "veterans & rookies" portion of the set (they're even labeled this time for the first time maybe ever?) only exists to fulfill the mandatory quota of non-prospect cards so people can get their hands on those juicy, juicy 1st's. No one is ever going to consider that Dylan Carlson card his "true rookie".

On to the prospects. At this point, Matthew Liberatore still hadn't made an appearance on the mound for a Cardinals organization team despite being well over a year removed from the trade that brought him to St. Louis. Such is life these days. We did get to see Liberatore in spring camp with the Cards this year, however, and he looked pretty good.

Jordan Walker made his debut in Bowman Draft last year, so I don't have piles of his cards (yet). What do I think about the design? Well... it's very Bowman-y?

Elehuris Montero was part of the Nolan Arenado trade, but Topps only had enough time to Photoshop him into a Cards jersey instead of a Rockies jersey. As usual, there are Chrome versions of all of the prospect cards, with more limited parallels to chase.

There's often a throwback insert design in Bowman, and this year they chose to honor the very underrated 1991 set. Sure, the set was nearly as ugly as the previous year, but I had a lot of fun opening these packs back in the day when I could find them. The player selection was improving, although I feel that had more to do with draft results from year to year more than anything else.

I had the Royals assigned as my random team. In an effort to get someone to sign up for them in my latest Spring Cleaning feature, I'll show off a couple of their cards. I'm not sure who Asa Lacy is, but apparently he's someone who only wants to exist in the future and make weird faces.

Here's one of baseball's top overall prospects. At some point, there's going to be a grandson in the big leagues of someone that I used to watch play, and that's when I know it's all over for me.